Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife follows queer South Asian men across national, regional, and urban borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. As migrants and transnational laborers, these men do not always reflect the dominant modes of dress, hairstyle, musical taste, or dance moves of their more cosmopolitan counterparts. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of "ishtyle" to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors' performances on the dance floor stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that while gay nightlife is discursively envisioned as an exceptional site of escape, utopia, and pleasure, it is actually imbricated in sociopolitical structures of the everyday. As such, the unlikely site of nightlife becomes a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.

A distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of ballet As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.

Engaging with a broad range of research and performance genres, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies offers the most comprehensive research on Hip Hop dance to date. Filling a lacuna in both Hip Hop and dance studies, the Handbook places practitioners' voices at the forefront and in dialogue with theoretical insights, rooted in critical race theory, anticolonialism, intersectional feminism, and more. Volume editors Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson have included influential dancers and scholars from around the world: from B-Boys Ken Swift, YNOT, and Storm, to practitioners of locking, waacking and House dance styles such as E. Moncell Durden, Terry Bright Kweku Ofosu, Fly Lady Di, and Leah McFly, and innovative academic work on Hip Hop dance by the most prominent researchers in the field. Throughout the Handbook contributors address individual and social histories of dance, Afrodiasporic and global lineages, the contribution of B-Girls from Honey Rockwell to Rokafella, the "studio-fication" of Hip Hop styles, and moves into theatre, TV, and the digital/social media space.

This cornerstone of the World of Art series is a succinct, vivid and authoritative guide to the rich history of western dance in all its incarnations from 16th-century court ballet to the genre-shattering contortions of 21st-century theatrical dance. Updated for the new millennium to feature the latest styles, performers and technology, this third edition reaffirms its status as the essential introduction to the subject.

Better Late Than Never is the extraordinary true story of how a man born into poverty in London's East End went on to find stardom late in life when he was chosen to be head judge on BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing. Len Goodman tells all about his new-found fame, his experiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and also on the no.1 US show Dancing with the Stars and his encounters with the likes of Heather Mills-McCartney and John Sergeant. But the real story is in his East End roots. And Len's early life couldn't be more East End. The son of a Bethnal Green costermonger he spent his formative years running the fruit and veg barrow and being bathed at night in the same water Nan used to cook the beetroot. There are echoes of Billy Elliot too. Though Len was a welder in the London Docks, he dreamt of being a professional footballer, and came close to making the grade had he not broken his foot on Hackney Marshes. The doctor recommended ballroom dancing as a light aid to his recovery. And Len, it turned out, was a natural. At first his family and work mates mocked, but soon he had made the final of a national competition and the welders descended en masse to the Albert Hall to cheer him on. With his dance partner, and then wife Cheryl, Len won the British Championships in his late twenties and ballroom dancing became his life. Funny and heart-warming, Len Goodman's autobiography has all the honest East End charm of Tommy Steele, Mike Read or Roberta Taylor.

Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of British South Asian dancers and celebrates their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance. Drawing on expertise gained from over seven years dancing in Britain, author Anusha Kedhar presents a multifaceted picture of British South Asian dance as its own distinctive genre.Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, and touring - alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, and global economic conditions - Flexible Bodies traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s "Cool Britannia" multiculturalism to fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and, more recently, the anti-immigration rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Kedhar draws on over a decade of interviews and conversations with dancers in Britain as well as in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works to reveal the creative ways in which British South Asian dancers negotiate neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices. Providing a new, critical dance studies lens through which to view the precarious economic, racial, national, and legal positions of South Asians in Britain,Flexible Bodies ultimately argues for centering dance labor in studies of neoliberalism.

How do I get a job as a dancer? Where and when should I train? How can I protect my body from injury? How do I become a choreographer? These and many more such questions asked by young or aspiring dancers are answered in this book - the most revealing and instructive book yet on what it means to be a dancer. Here is advice from some of the best dancers and choreographers in the world, crossing the fields of ballet, contemporary, South Asian dance, musical theatre and hip hop, and covering subjects both motivational and mundane, from tapping into your own reserves of creativity and resilience, to the important matter of when to eat your pre-show banana. The twenty-five experts in these pages have performed with the likes of the Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Rambert, Matthew Bourne's New Adventures and BalletBoyz; they range from stars of the West End stage to TV talent-show successes and Kylie's backing dancers - as well as some of Britain's leading choreographers. They are Carlos Acosta, Matthew Bourne, Teneisha Bonner, Darcey Bussell, Lauren Cuthbertson, Maxine Doyle, Tommy Franzen, Adam Garcia, Jonathan Goddard, Matthew Golding, Melissa Hamilton, Wayne McGregor, Steven McRae, Stephen Mear, Cassa Pancho, Seeta Patel, Arlene Phillips, Arthur Pita, Kate Prince, Matthew Rees, Tamara Rojo, Kenrick 'H2O' Sandy, Hofesh Shechter, Aaron Sillis and Marlon 'Swoosh' Wallen.

Drawing on avant garde and classical Japanese dance traditions, the Alishina Method offers a systematized approach to Butoh dance training for the first time in its history. With practical instruction and fully illustrated exercises, this book teaches readers: * basic body training and expression exercises * exercises to cultivate Qi (energy) and to aid improvisation * about katas (forms) and how to develop your own * the importance of voice, sound and music in Butoh * to collaborate and be in harmony with others * techniques to manipulate time and space * how to develop the imagination and refine the senses to enrich performance. This authentic approach to Japanese dance will be compelling reading for anyone interested in contemporary dance, performance arts, Japanese culture or personal development techniques.

Anne Green Gilbert's Brain-Compatible Dance Education, Second Edition, strikes the perfect balance between hard science and practicality, making it an ideal resource for dance educators working with dancers of all ages and abilities. Gilbert presents the latest brain research and its implications for dance educators and dancers. She makes the research findings accessible and easy to digest, always connecting the science to the teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms and studios. This new edition of Brain-Compatible Dance Education features Gilbert's unique BrainDance warm-up, made up of eight developmental movement patterns for people of all ages, from birth to older adults. This BrainDance warm-up helps dancers improve focus and productivity as it invigorates their minds and bodies and gets their synapses firing. In addition, this edition offers the following new material: * 24 new lesson plans geared to all age groups, from birth on up * New tips and tools to strengthen your teaching skills and provide a foundation for advocating for dance in schools and communities * A new web resource that includes 11 video clips of BrainDance with variations for diverse audiences, as well as printable lesson plans, posters, charts, and assessment templates The video clips on the web resource are great teaching aids that show you real-world examples of how the movements are done. The clips show dancers from infants to seniors, from beginners to advanced students, and those with special needs. The text is organized into three parts. Part I presents the theory behind brain-compatible dance education, offering an overview of the latest brain research, outlining the 10 principles of brain-compatible dance education, and exploring how to plan engaging lessons and use tools to assess your dancers. Part II describes the lesson plan elements in depth, including warming up, exploring concepts, developing skills, creating, and cooling down. In part III, Gilbert offers her new sequential and holistic lesson plans for ages 0 through 4, 5 through 8, 9 through 18, and adults. Brain-Compatible Dance Education, Second Edition, will revitalize your dance classes by improving your students' focus as they perform the repetitions that are so necessary for skill development. It will help you understand the vital link between movement and cognition, develop holistic lesson plans for any age and population, and bring the joy of movement into students' lives.

In "Agency and Embodiment," Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.

Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia feeling the body move encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

Borrowing from contemporary semiotics and post-structuralist criticism, Foster outlines four models for representation in dance which are illustrated through an analysis of the works of contemporary choreographers and through historical examples beginning with court ballets of the Renaissance.

In early twentieth-century Europe, the watershed developments of pictorial abstraction, modern dance, and cinema coincided to shift the artistic landscape and the future of modern art. In Moving Modernism, Nell Andrew challenges assumptions about modernist abstraction and its appearance in the field of painting. By recovering performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence for avant-garde dance pioneers and filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period - including dancer Loie Fuller, who presented to symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged or suspended vision; Valentine de Saint-Point, whose radical dance paralleled the abstractions of cubo-futurist painting; Sophie Taeuber and her Dada dance; the Belgian "pure plastics" choreographer known as Akarova; and the dance-like cinema of Germaine Dulac - Andrew demonstrates that abstraction was deployed not only as modernist form but as an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception across artistic media.

This book is a compilation of essays by distinguished writers, critics and artists in the field of Dance and African American Studies who address several areas and disciplines of African dance both on the continent and in the diaspora. Sir Rex Nettleford, the distinguished Jamaican choreographer, professor and writer, stresses in the foreword to the book, the continuity between all dances that derive from Africa and the significance of this book. African dance, he argues, is a dominant, pervasive and empowering force in African communities.

The four themes covered are tradition, tradition and continuity, tradition transformed, and tradition contextualized. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and African American scholars each focus on some aspect of African dance that provide the connecting patterns. Besides Sir Rex Nettleford, other contributors to this book include Pearl Primus, Maware Opoku, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Myriam Evelyse Mariani, Cynthia S'thembile West and Omofolabo Soyinka Ajayi.

Published in Valiz's new "Antennae" series devoted to new research in art, photography, architecture and design, "Moving Together" examines contemporary dance from both a practical and theoretical perspective. The author, Professor Rudi Laermans, analyzes three tendencies: pure dance, dance theater and (self-) reflexive dance. He proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how artistic cooperation figures into the creation of dance. Boasting a great design by the maverick Dutch studio Metahaven, "Moving Together" includes dialogues with some of the most influential names in contemporary dance spanning several generations: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founder of the cutting-edge dance company Rosas; Jerome Bel, the controversial and experimental French choreographer; William Forsythe, known internationally for his work with Ballett Frankfurt (1984-2004) and The Forsythe Company (2005-present); as well as many others dance innovators.

When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers-Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda-and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers' varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China's metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complements to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.

Rich in satire, Monique Mojica's critique of the misrepresentation of Indigenous women in American myth, literature, and documentary confronts a longstanding history of sexual violence and condemns colonial traditions that represent Indigenous women as little more than creators and healers. Since it was first published in 1991, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots has become a classic in Canadian theatre and is still widely studied at universities and colleges around the world. The remarkable CBC radio play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea is also included.

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Author SanSan Kwan looks specifically at duets, focusing on "East" "West" pairings, and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds -Asia, the Asian diaspora, Europe, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh - find ways to collaborate. Kwan acknowledges the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately asserts that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation. Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture. Body-to-body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

What is the legacy of Martha Graham and why does it endure? How and why did the philosophy and subsequent canon of Martha Graham flood out into an artistic diaspora that is still a wellspring of inspiration for contemporary artists? How do dancers that have never studied with, or worked under, Martha Graham maintain her vision? All of these questions, and many more, are considered in this fascinating book, authored by one of the Martha Graham Company's ex-principal dancers, which illuminates the ongoing significance of the Martha Graham Dance Company almost 100 years after it was founded. Through doing so, we are offered a study of the history of the Martha Graham Dance Company - the longest-standing modern dance company in America, its international diaspora and the current generation of dancers taking up the mantel. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted for the book, the company's story is told through the experiences, inspirations, motivations and words of performers from Graham's iconic artistic lineage.

In Dance for Sports, author, choreographer, and dance instructor Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency and relaxation. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a cross training activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career and extensive experience with athletes and coaches in sports from basketball to swimming to track and field, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike.

Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, "Mexican American Mojo" is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility, Anthony Macias shows how by participating in jazz, the zoot suit phenomenon, car culture, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Latin music, Mexican Americans not only rejected second-class citizenship and demeaning stereotypes, but also transformed Los Angeles.

Macias conducted numerous interviews for "Mexican American Mojo," and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macias examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots "multicultural urban civility" that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macias, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians' union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet OaShea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.